Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to behind the Scams. I'm Nick and with me is sue, my favorite co host, my lovely wife, and the person who keeps me sane day to day.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Glad to hear I'm still at the top of the co host rankings.
But keeping you sane day to day might be pushing it.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Not really, but go with it for now so we don't start out on the wrong foot.
But, sue, in this episode, we are going to talk about a romance scammer that. That redefined how we think about digital predators.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: The FBI called this investigation a romance scam on steroids, which is a pretty serious label.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: It really is. Now, sue, as you know, we have been working on this case for a while.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: We sure have, Nick. There is a lot of information out there on this case and a lot of material to go through. And of course, yours truly has been doing the deep dives into the documents.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: You certainly have, and I give you all the credit.
One of the big reasons I wanted to get this out is because the FBI has been making a push to help identify any other potential victims of this female romance scammer. This case is a cross border crime spree of a woman named Aurora Phelps. She took the old predictable playbook of online dating deception and weaponized it into something far more dangerous. The FBI believes there may be more victims out there.
So they have requested that we assist, along with other podcasters, YouTubers and social media influencers, help get the word out.
They have a dedicated webpage on the FBI website with information on this case and where any other potential victims or persons with any information can assist.
A link will be provided in a description for this podcast episode.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: That's right, Nick.
So please, if anyone out there listening recognizes this information or please contact the FBI. This woman escalated from basic digital manipulation to kidnapping, multi million dollar theft, and ultimately murder.
Even though she is currently in custody doesn't mean that all the victims have been identified.
So we're helping spread the word.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: And the sheer velocity of that escalation is why we really need to unpack this today.
I mean, romance scams, they are practically an ancient industry at this point.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. The classic sweetheart bundle has been around since people were put in classified ads in local newspapers.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Yep, that's right. And usually it follows this very predictable trajectory, Right?
Someone builds a fake emotional connection, they invent some sort of crisis, they ask for a wire transfer, and then they just disappear.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: But Phelps completely rewrote that manual. She didn't just break hearts and drain checking accounts. I mean, she turned modern digital dating applications into literal, high stakes hunting grounds.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Yeah, she was hunting a very specific, highly vulnerable demographic. And I think this case really proves that the modern digital dating landscape, it requires an entirely new level of vigilance from all of us.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: It really does.
The level of calculation here is just staggering. The FBI has confirmed at least 11 victims so far. But based on her timeline and her methods, they strongly suspect the true number is much, much higher.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Right. To understand how she operated, we cannot just list her crimes. We have to break down the mechanics, how she built the facade, how she found vulnerable targets, and how she used psychology to disarm successful, experienced men.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: So let's start with victimology.
Who was she actually hunting?
[00:03:49] Speaker A: That's right. And most importantly, how did she manipulate human psychology to completely disarm these grown, highly successful men? She was operating with almost surgical precision.
She used aliases like Sissy Boreas, Boris Laura, Aurora Velasco, and Aurora Flores across platforms including Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: So many names to keep track of.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: Right, and she would use these on platforms like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble.
But she wasn't just swiping randomly to see who would take the bait.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: No, she was running a very specific filter. She sought out older retired men who had stable, liquid incomes.
She wanted guys with silent savings accounts, union pensions, strong Social Security payouts or stock portfolios.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: And she frequently targeted expats living down in Mexico.
Specifically, she focused on the Lake Chapla and Guadalajara area.
She did not being or she looked for older gentlemen clustered around the Las Vegas area.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Think about the psychology of that expat community for a second.
These were men who had moved far from their primary family support networks.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: Right. Many were seeking a geographic cure for loneliness. Or simply trying to stretch their retirement dollars in a warmer climate.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Exactly. So they're often quite isolated, they might be dealing with language barriers, and they
[00:05:21] Speaker A: are heavily reliant on making new social connections just to get by.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: And these were guys who had worked incredibly hard their whole lives. I mean, engineers, stagehands, medical professionals, film executives. And now they were just looking for companionship.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: And that isolation is exactly the vulnerability she exploited.
But the psychological masterstroke of her operation, the way she bypassed their natural defenses. It is fascinating, it really is.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Because when you think of a typical romance scammer, you imagine that whole damsel in distress routine. Right?
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Right. Like they pretend to be stuck at an airport, or they have a sudden medical emergency and need money for surgery.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Or they just need a thousand dollars to fix a broken car so they can finally Come visit you.
They position themselves as incredibly needy. But Phelps engineered the exact opposite reality, right?
[00:06:23] Speaker A: She built this massive public social media alter ego under the name Boreas.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: She essentially positioned herself as a high end luxury influencer.
She actively branded herself as this wealthy, highly successful, financially independent socialite.
If you went to her pages, you saw these elaborate high production unboxing videos.
I mean, she was constantly showing off incredibly expensive high end merchandise.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: We are talking limited edition designer purses, Dior, Chanel, Rolexes.
She clearly craved the spotlight and projected this image of a superstar who was just independently wealthy. Right?
[00:07:09] Speaker B: Someone who bought all these lavish gifts for herself.
But let's dissect the logic of that for a second, because on the surface it seems totally counterintuitive to goals of a thief.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: It really does. I mean, if you are trying to steal a retiree's pension, why would you flaunt staggering wealth?
[00:07:28] Speaker B: Exactly. I mean, the first rule of criminal survival is you do not draw attention to yourself and you definitely do not flaunt wealth. You cannot legitimately explain to the IRS or the police.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: Her luxury Instagram profile was not just bragging. It was psychological camouflage, that is the
[00:07:48] Speaker B: halo effect in action.
In nature, predators use physical camouflage to blend into the foliage.
Phelps used Dior and Chanel to blend into the upper class, which creates this
[00:08:01] Speaker A: blinding socioeconomic halo effect.
If you put yourself in the shoes of one of these targets, you are a retired engineer in your 60s. You meet an attractive younger woman on Tinder.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Naturally your guard might be up a little bit.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: You might wonder, you know, is she just after my retirement savings?
[00:08:20] Speaker B: But then she shows up for a date dripping in $5,000 worth of Chanel, driving a really nice car, seemingly way more rich than you are.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Your brain mathematically rules out the possibility that she needs your two thousand dollar a month pension.
By looking like she didn't need their money, she totally bypassed every single red flag these men had put up.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: You just wouldn't suspect her at all. The camouflage was basically perfect.
When she met these men, she was polite, she was charming, and crucially, she never asked about their financial status on the first few dates.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: Right.
Her dating profiles looked entirely normal as and pleasantly engaging.
Combined with her apparent independent wealth, her targets were completely disarmed.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: They had absolutely zero reason to fear that this wealthy socialite was actually an apex predator, calculating the exact dosage of sedatives needed to plunder their retirement assets.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: But the dark reality of where that independent wealth actually came from is where the cycle becomes truly sinister.
This wasn't a Successful influencer business, monetizing social media engagement.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: No, not at all. The luxury goods she was flaunting on camera, the Dior and the Chanel, were literally the physical spoils of her previous crimes.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: She was actively using the stolen credit cards and the liquidated assets from her past victims to purchase this merchandise. And she was having it shipped directly to her apartment in Las Vegas.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: It is basically a self sustaining ecosystem of theft.
She uses the funds from victim number one to purchase the luxury camouflage necessary to bait victim number two.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: That's right. She publicly exhibits her thefts on social media, which feeds her own narcissism. And then she weaponizes that stolen glamour to lower the defenses of the next unsuspecting target. And from a behavioral profiling standpoint, the adaptability required to pull this off is terrifying.
Investigators and people who knew her repeatedly noted that she was an absolute chameleon. Drawing on my time as a special agent, I can tell you that level of adaptability is rare.
She didn't just change her name.
She could manipulate her entire personality.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: Right. Just turning traits on and off like a light switch.
It was as if there were 10 different distinct people living inside her.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: She possessed this psychopathic ability to read the specific psychological deficit of her target and instantly become whatever they were missing.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: If a man wanted someone quiet and demure and supportive, she became that.
If you wanted an outgoing, fiery socialite to show off at parties, she seamlessly transitioned into that role.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Which makes perfect sense when we look at the origin story of her criminality.
This level of manipulation doesn't just spontaneously generate out of nowhere in Las Vegas.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: No. If we trace the timeline back, the roots of her deception take us to her early adulthood in Arkansas.
She was living there, married to her first husband, a man named Alejandra Alvarez.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: And that marriage eventually dissolved into a highly contentious divorce and a really bitter custody battle.
The mechanics of that custody battle reveal everything about her operational mindset.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Yeah, when the court granted Alejandro custody of their three children, she didn't just accept the ruling or file a standard legal appeal like a normal person.
No, she launched a vicious, highly calculated campaign of revenge aimed at completely destroying him.
She initiated false abuse claims, which is a devastating tactic on its own.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: But her technological methodology is what truly stands out here. She actually coached her brother, who was living down in Mexico at the time time, on how to digitally spoof threatening phone calls and text messages. Let's explain how spoofing actually works, because it requires a specific type of cold calculation.
Spoofing is not just blocking your caller ID Right.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: It's way more involved.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: It involves manipulating the data transmitted during the initial connection of a call, often using voice over Internet protocol software so that the receiving network displays a completely fabricated origin number.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: So she orchestrated this entire setup where her brother was sending violent, terrifying threats, but manipulating the data packet so it looked undeniably like the threats were originating from her ex husband's phone.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: She was literally trying to frame him for a felony just to steal back custody.
It requires a level of technological manipulation and sociopathic determination attachment that goes far beyond a standard domestic dispute.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: She was weaponizing the telecommunications infrastructure to destroy a man's life.
But fortunately, local law enforcement in Arkansas was competent enough to see through the digital smoke and mirrors.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: Right, they subpoenaed the telephone provider logs, they traced the true, originating IP addresses back back to Mexico, uncovered the whole conspiracy, and immediately issued a felony warrant for her arrest.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: And realizing the net was closing, she skipped town.
She evaded authorities and fled west to Las Vegas.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: But the timeline shows she eventually returned to Arkansas for a brief period.
And that is where we witnessed the critical transition in her criminal evolution.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah, that is where she executed what the FBI, FBI, firmly believes was her test run for the drug induced robberies that would become her signature.
And the target she chose for this test run tells you everything you need to know about her total lack of empathy. She didn't target a wealthy stranger or a faceless mark in a casino. No, she targeted a woman she had been close friends. Friends with for three solid years.
Someone who trusted her implicitly.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: Phelps arranged to meet this friend in a hotel room under the guise of just catching up. And at some point during the meeting, she secretly administered a heavy dose of sedatives into her friend's food or drink.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: When the friend finally regained consciousness hours later, she was completely alone in the hotel room.
She found her wallet gone.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: And almost immediately, she discovered that unauthorized high dollar charges were already being racked up across multiple credit cards.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Now, thankfully, the friends survived the drugging, but for Phelps, this event was a wildly successful proof of concept.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: It proved she could successfully dose a target, render them incapacitated, execute a robbery, steal their identity and escape long before they woke up.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: And you have to ask, where does a scammer get the medical knowledge to pull this off without accidentally killing the target on the first try?
[00:15:57] Speaker A: That is the terrifying variable here.
Back in Arkansas, prior to all this, Phelps had actually worked as a pharmacy technician.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Oh, wow. So she actually have professional foundational knowledge to pull it off?
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Not exactly. She wasn't just guessing with street drugs. She understood how central nervous system depressants work. She understood the mechanics of relaxants, sedatives and hypnotics.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: She knew how these chemicals interact with receptors in the brain to induce anti grade amnesia, meaning the victim cannot form new memories while under the influence.
She understood dosing thresholds.
She knew exactly how to weaponize the modern pharmacy to turn a human being into a compliant unconscious vault.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: So she has the proof of concept from the hotel room. She possesses the lethal pharmacological knowledge. And she realizes she has the psychological makeup to pull this off without any hesitation.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: But stealing a handful of credit cards from a friend is not going to fund that extravagant Dior red luxury lifestyle she is obsessed with.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: No.
So that is the moment she pivots. She abandons small scale theft and shifts her focus entirely to the digital hunting grounds, setting her sights on those older, wealthy old men we discussed earlier.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Which brings us to a massive, violent escalation.
A critical turning point in the timeline occurs on November 1, 2021, in Las Vegas.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: She had targeted a retired film professional in his 60s. They connected on a dating website and had gone out on a few casual lunch dates.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: But this victim actually had good instincts.
After few meetings, he decided he didn't really feel a connection and tried to pull back, just attempting to politely end the brief relationship.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: But Phelps did not accept rejection, especially not from a target she'd already vetted for financial viability.
She aggressively forced her way back into his orbit.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: She showed up at his private residence, uninvited, carrying food.
That detail matters because it becomes one of her repeated tactics.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: Showing up uninvited with hot food is a brilliant, highly manipulative method of disarming someone.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: It really is.
It leverages the psychological principle of reciprocity.
It forces a sudden social obligation on the victim.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: Right.
If someone stands on your porch with a warm meal they supposedly cooked just for you, social conditioning makes it incredibly difficult to just slam the door in their face.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: It feels rude. It feels ungrateful.
So that manufactured social obligation got her inside his home, bypassing his boundaries and his physical defenses.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: And once she was inside, she executed her protocol. She drugged his food.
But this was not a quick theft. She did not incapacitate him just long enough to take his wallet and leave.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: No, she kept this man largely unconscious, trapped inside his own home for approximately five agonizing days.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Five days.
I mean, think about the. The physical and neurological toll that takes on a human body.
He later provided this nightmarish account to investigators of this entire period.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: He recalled only briefly Surfacing from the darkness, barely conscious, paralyzed by blue of drugs, just long enough to feel her physically forcing his jaw open and shoving more pills down his throat to force him back under.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: While he is incapacitated, paralyzed in his own bed for nearly a week, she goes to work dismantling his life.
She physically steals his iPad, his iPhone and his wallet.
[00:19:56] Speaker B: With those devices, she essentially takes total unchecked control of his entire digital and financial footprint.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: She manages to bypass the security on his banking apps and successfully wires $65,000 directly out of his USAA account.
[00:20:15] Speaker B: 65,000 is a massive theft, but for her it was really just the appetizer.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Exactly. When she had his devices, she went for the kill shot. She logged into his E Rate account, initiated a massive liquidation and attempted to steal $3.3 million in blue chip Apple stock.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: $3.3 million.
I mean a sum that would have funded her camouflage indefinitely.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: But here is where we actually see the institutional safeguards function exactly as they are designed to.
That massive stock answer was flagged and aggressively blocked before the assets could be moved. Let's break down how that institutional block actually works because it is crucial for people to understand how financial institutions institutions fight this kind of thing. Yeah.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: It is not a person sitting at a desk looking at every single transaction.
It relies on highly complex anti money laundering or AML algorithms.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: Right. When you attempt to suddenly liquidate over $3 million in stock and move it to a new unverified account, it triggers massive behavioral velocity flags.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: The systems use device fingerprinting and and geographic IP logging.
Even though she was using his own iPad, the system likely flagged the sudden erratic nature of the request.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Probably combined with the fact that the receiving accounts were totally outside the victim's historical financial behavior.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Exactly. So the algorithms froze the transaction pending a manual compliance review, effectively saving his life savings.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: And incredibly, the victim himself survived the ordeal.
After five days, days felts abandoned the house. He eventually managed to wake up from the drug induced coma.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: He was completely disoriented, his motor functions were severely impaired. But he managed to find a hidden spare set of car keys.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: He was in such a catastrophic physical state that he actually crashed his car while desperately trying to drive himself to the emergency room.
But he survived, he recovered.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: Then most importantly, he immediately contacted law enforcement and reported her. And that survival is what the FBI believes triggered a deeply minister a permanent shift in her methodology.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: Right. If you look at it from an investigative viewpoint analyzing behavioral evolution, a predator always learns from their mistakes.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: Her takeaway from losing that three million dollar payout wasn't, oh, I almost killed a man. I need to stop before I get caught.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Her sociopathic takeaway was because he lived, he was able to call his bank, change his passwords, and alert the police.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: She decided I can never leave a witness alive again.
The logic is just chilling.
She realized that survival equals risk.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: She made the calculated decision that from that point forward, her targets had to die.
Dead men cannot call the police, they cannot freeze their accounts, and they cannot identify her in a lineup.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: This is the exact moment where the romance scam metastasizes into a string of calculated fatalities, a truly destructive serial crime spree.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Because, remember, Phelps holds dual citizenship in the United States and Mexico. Following the failed $3 million heist, she begins actively bouncing between Las Vegas and the expat communities down in Mexico.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: She was utilizing the border as a shield.
And just over a month after she left that man for dead in Vegas In December of 2021, she locks on to her next target.
[00:24:15] Speaker A: His name was Robert Urbach, though everyone knew him as Beau.
He was a 67 year old retired stagehand living in Guadalajara.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: Beau was a guy who had lived an incredible, vibrant life. He had spent his career working massive tours with the rolling stones, Paul McCartney, Az Osborne.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: He was deeply beloved by his union brothers back in the States and by his adopted children.
He had moved down to Mexico to peacefully enjoy his hard earned retirement in the sun.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: And like so many others, he was just looking for a connection.
He met Sissy on Tinder.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: The digital records show they arranged to meet for a date at the Hard Rock Cafe in Guadalajara on December 11, 2021.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: And immediately following that date, Beau completely vanished. But his family and friends had no idea he was dead. Because Phelps instantly initiated a highly aggressive digital cover up.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: She took possession of Bo's phone and began texting his son. But she made a massive operational error here.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: She did. The text messages were written in broken, heavily accented English syntax, which Bo, an American stagehand, absolutely did not speak or write.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: The bizarre messages claimed that he was abruptly packing up and moving to Ecuador and explicitly told his family to just stop looking for him.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: If you receive a text like that from a parent, your blood just runs cold.
It is a massive screaming anomaly.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: So while his family is panicking, desperately trying to figure out what is happening, filing missing persons reports in California, Phelps is methodically looting the remnants of his life.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: And local Mexican authorities could do very little at that point due to jurisdictional boundaries.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: The logistics of her theft here are just astounding.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: She physically steals his BMW in Guadalajara and actually drives a stolen vehicle across the international border, bringing it all the way back to Las Vegas.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: Then, utilizing the personal data she stripped from him, she contacts his union back in the States. She attempts to entirely redirect his union
[00:26:34] Speaker B: pension, forging documents to make herself the sole beneficiary of his life's work.
She is literally calling a labor union, pretending to act on his behalf, trying to steal his pension, all while she
[00:26:48] Speaker A: knows full well his body is decomposing.
Bose's remains were discovered dumped along a desolate roadside just two days after their date at the Hard Rock Cafe.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: But because she had stripped him of his wallet and all identification, he sat as a John Doe in a Mexican morgue for over a year.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: His family lived in agonizing limbo for months.
It wasn't until federal agents finally started tracing the financial connections tracking the movement of his money to Phelps's accounts that they were able to locate the remains.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: They had to utilize DNA testing to confirm it was Beau and finally return him to his loved ones.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: The sheer audacity of stealing a man's car, driving it to another country, and trying to hijack his pension while he lies unidentified in a morgue.
It demonstrates a complete void of human conscience.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: And the terrifying part is that the violence didn't slow her down at all.
Just a few months later, in May of 2022, she surfaces again, targeting another vulnerable expat in Mexico, Manuel Gus.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Known to everyone in his community as Gigi.
Gigi was the exact opposite of a quiet, isolated retiree.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: He was an extroverted, highly social, vibrant retiree from the music industry.
He spoke fluent Spanish. He ran a popular food trailer business in the town of Ajiich, and he was essentially a local celebrity.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: Everyone knew him.
He started dating Phelps.
And the real tragedy of this specific case is that Gigi was explicitly, directly warned about her.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: His close friend, a man named Lenny, actually saw through the facade.
Lenny sat Gigi down and explicitly told him, be careful. You are a target.
This woman is dangerous.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: But Gigi dismissed the warning entirely. He felt confident. He felt he was worldly enough to know what he was doing and who he was dealing with. I want you to put yourself in Gigi's shoes for a second, because it is so easy from the outside to judge a victim for ignoring a warning, Right?
[00:29:05] Speaker B: You are retired. You live alone, and someone who seems incredibly successful, wealthy and attractive is giving you her undivided, intoxicating attention.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: It feels incredible.
If your friend pulls you aside and tells you this amazing woman is actually a predator, Your brain naturally protects your happiness.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: You don't believe him. You think your friend is just being paranoid or maybe even a little jealous of your new relationship.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: Fraud does not just exploit our greed. It exploits our desperate, deep human need to maintain the reality we want to believe in.
It is willful blindness, fueled by loneliness.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: And that willful blindness cost him his life.
In May of 2022, Gigi, a man who religiously, without fail, called his daughter every single day, suddenly went completely silent.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: His daughter couldn't reach him. Texts were left unread. The panic sets in.
She contacted the local authorities in Ajich to perform a welfare check at his home.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: The police entered the residence and found Gigi deceased on his bathroom floor. The place had been totally stripped.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: His phone was gone. His car had been stolen. And in a detail that truly highlights her cruelty, she even stole his dog. But this is where the arrogance of the predator becomes their undoing.
The money trail is always what catches them.
Investigators began a forensic audit of Gigi's finances following the discovery of his body.
[00:30:42] Speaker B: They found a critical, undeniable clue.
A massive charge had been placed on his account to the American Precious Metals Exchange, commonly known as apmx, for a highly valuable gold coin.
[00:30:59] Speaker A: Let's look at how crucial that digital footprint is.
When you purchase from an entity like apmx, you are subject to know your customer or KYC regulations.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: They track IP addresses. They require verifiable shipping data. The investigators pulled the shipping manifests and the server logs.
[00:31:19] Speaker A: The records conclusively prove that this gold coin was purchased and shipped directly to Aurora Phil's residential address in Las Vegas, Nevada.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: And the timestamps showed the purchase was executed after Gigi was already lying dead on his bathroom floor. She could not resist the urge to continue draining his resources even after he was gone.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: That insatiable greed left a direct, traceable and undeniable line straight from a corpse in Mexico to her front door in Las Vegas.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: But her spree in Mexico was not strictly limited to fatalities.
There was a near miss around mid 2022 that perfectly illustrates her absolute reptilian cold bloodedness. When confronted with unexpected variables, she ruthlessly
[00:32:11] Speaker A: targeted a United States citizen who was living and working as a chiropractor down in Mexico.
The setup was identical. They matched on a dating app, went out for a nice meal, and returned to his private residence.
[00:32:25] Speaker B: The victim later recalled to investigators that she must have slipped the sedatives into his food or drink while they were
[00:32:32] Speaker A: at the restaurant, because shortly after they arrived back at his house, the drugs hit him. Like a freight train, he became entirely semi conscious, paralyzed, but slightly aware.
[00:32:44] Speaker B: And as he is lying there, completely incapacitated, she does not even wait to ensure he is fully under.
She immediately begins aggressively ransacking his home.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: She is tearing through drawers, yeah, violently
[00:33:00] Speaker B: hunting for financial documents, bank account numbers, jewelry, anything of immediate liquid value.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: But she made a massive tactical error in her pre attack surveillance.
She failed to realize he was not alone in the house.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: He employed a housekeeper who was asleep in another wing of the residence.
The housekeeper wakes up to the sound of drawers being smashed open.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: She walks out into the main living area and finds the strange woman actively plundering her boss's home while he is passed out on the furniture.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: If a normal burglar is caught in the act, they panic, they run, they fight.
Felb's reaction is just terrifyingly cool.
[00:33:44] Speaker A: Her heart rate probably didn't even spike.
She looks directly at the housekeeper and calmly, convincingly claims that her boss is just incredibly drunk.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: She then actually manipulates this poor, confused housekeeper into helping her drag the unconscious man into, into the bathroom.
[00:34:03] Speaker A: Phelps tells her they need to submerge him in a bathtub full of water to, you know, wake him up. I have to pause here because we need to talk about the forensic realities of that specific action.
Putting a heavily sedated unconscious person into a bathtub full of water is not some folk remedy to wake them up.
[00:34:24] Speaker B: No, it is a highly calculated, lethally effective method of murder designed to evade forensic scrutiny.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: If a sedated man slips under the water, his lungs fill with fluid.
When the local medical examiner runs the toxicology and performs the autopsy, they find water in the lungs and depressants in the bloodstream.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: The official ruling is almost always accidental drowning secondary to intoxication.
It is a brilliant way to mask a homicide after as a tragic accident.
[00:34:58] Speaker A: It was a lethal, perfectly engineered setup. But incredibly, sheer luck intervened.
Just as they get him in the water, other staff members happen to arrive at the house for their shift.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: They walk in, immediately recognize the extreme danger of the situation, physically pull him out of the water and frantically call an ambulance and the local police.
[00:35:21] Speaker A: The chiropractor was rushed to the emergency room, fell into a deep coma. But miraculously, he eventually survived.
[00:35:29] Speaker B: And when he regained his faculties, he made one thing explicitly clear to the authorities.
He does not even drink alcohol.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: He could not possibly have been drunk. The entire narrative she fed the housekeeper was a lie to facilitate a murder.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: Yet despite being interrupted mid robbery and nearly caught by multiple witnesses, she still managed to escape the house with $25,000 in jewelry, cash, and high end electronics.
[00:36:01] Speaker A: She just narrowly escaped a murder charge because of a live in housekeeper. But rather than laying low, that close call seemed to actually accelerate her timeline and amplify her audacity.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: Just months later, In November of 2022, she surfaces again.
The FBI is already quietly piecing the macro timeline together across international borders. But she strikes right in her own backyard.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: That's right. He lives in Las Vegas and his name is John Wiens.
John was an elderly retired engineer, he was a painter, and he was an absolute massive dog lover.
[00:36:42] Speaker B: He had recently confided in his family that he was tired of being alone in the house.
He wanted companionship. So he decided to try navigating the complex world of modern dating apps.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: He even cheerfully told his relatives that he was excited about a date he had finally set up with a woman he met online.
The digital trail shows they went to a local Vegas restaurant, and then she accompanied him back to his home.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: She executed the standard protocol, which involved drugging him heavily at his residence.
But this time, something spooked her. Or she was operating on a compressed timeline because she fled the residence in a massive hurry.
[00:37:24] Speaker A: And in her haste, she left John's beloved dog totally unattended inside the house.
And that tiny detail is the thread that unraveled everything for his son Mike,
[00:37:35] Speaker B: who knew his father intimately.
The idea of John leaving his dog alone overnight without making arrangements was just mathematically impossible.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: It was the immediate blaring alarm bell that something catastrophic had occurred.
Mike immediately requests a police welfare check.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: The officers find the house empty and that he clearly left in a rush with the dog barking frantically inside. Mike immediately books a flight to Vegas and enters his father's house and begins finding incredibly strange anomalies.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: Sitting right on his dad's desk is a stack of old expired driver's licenses, identities likely being prepped for fraud.
[00:38:18] Speaker B: Mike is smart. He grabs his dad's laptop, manages to bypass the login, and discovers a string of bizarre, highly expensive digital purchases being executed in real time time.
[00:38:32] Speaker A: He is watching high end Dior merchandise and luxury goods being bought on his father's accounts. Purchases that a retired frugal engineer would absolutely never make for himself.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: And when Mike clicks on the shipping details, every single luxury item is being routed directly to Aurora Phelps's Las Vegas apartment.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: While Mike is sitting in his missing father's house staring at this terrifying digital edition evidence. The local Las Vegas police are actively trying to ping and text John W's
[00:39:03] Speaker B: cell phone, and they are receiving replies.
But it Isn't John texting them back? It is Phelps.
She has his phone, and she is casually texting the police, pretending to be John, assuring them that everything is perfectly fine and that he just spontaneously decided to take a trip.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: But what she was actually doing with John while she sent those texts is perhaps the most brazen, chilling part of this entire investigation.
Because John wasn't on a spontaneous trip. He was being kidnapped in broad daylight.
Law enforcement eventually managed to subpoena and pull the security camera footage from the airport.
The footage is haunting.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: It shows John wearing those old sweatpants, missing his glasses, looking completely incapacitated.
He was drugged so heavily with central nervous system depressants that he was rendered entirely helpless, effectively a zombie.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: Cameras capture Phelps casually pushing him in a wheelchair. She books a flight, flies him from Vegas to San Diego.
[00:40:13] Speaker B: And then she literally pushes this heavily drugged dying man in a wheelchair through the Cross Border Express tunnel. Let's explain what that is, because it is a massive logistical blind spot.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: Right? The Cross Border Express, or cbx, is an enclosed pedestrian bridge that directly connects San Diego to the Tijuana International Airport terminal in Mexico. You walk across it, you pass through customs, and you are in a foreign country.
You and I know it well because we go down to Mexico all the time and have used this exact Cross Border Express many times.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: We sure have. And the genius of her camouflage here is terrifying.
Think about airport security.
They are trained to look for nervous smugglers, erratic behavior, unattended bags.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: But human beings are socially conditioned to look away from the elderly and the disabled.
We don't want to stare.
[00:41:13] Speaker B: To every Customs and Border Protection agent, to every Mexican immigration official, she just looked like a loving caregiver, a devoted daughter helping her alien father navigate the stressful environment of an airport.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: That elder care camouflage rendered her completely invisible to the security apparatus.
She wheels him into Tijuana, boards a domestic flight to Mexico City, and they check into a hotel.
[00:41:40] Speaker B: Within days, John is found dead in the hotel bathtub.
Another bathtub. The exact same lethal setup she attempted with the chiropractor. Finally executed to completion, his body ends
[00:41:54] Speaker A: up sitting in a Mexican morgue, eventually having to be identified through complex DNA testing coordinated by the FBI.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: While she is back in her Las Vegas apartment, unboxing the very Dior bag she bought with his stolen credit cards, she has morphed into a ruthless and callous murderer.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: Which brings us to a massive, glaring question that the FBI, and frankly, everyone analyzing this case, had to confront.
How on earth was she operating a transnational murder and extortion syndicate without her husband noticing.
[00:42:31] Speaker B: We have to examine the domestic reality of her life. While she is commuting back and forth across the international border, drugging men, kidnapping retirees in wheelchairs and liquidating their stock
[00:42:44] Speaker A: portfolios, she is returning home every night to a downtown Las Vegas apartment.
She shares this apartment with her baby daughter and her husband, a man named William Cody Phelps.
[00:42:56] Speaker B: They had a long history together.
They had met 14 years prior when she was working as a waitress at an ihop.
They were married. They were sharing life, sharing a small living space.
[00:43:09] Speaker A: As an investigator, I mean, you know this. The very first place you look when dismantling a conspiracy is the spouse. Always. Because it is practically impossible to run a multinational criminal enterprise generating massive amounts of unexplained physical goods and cash out of your shared living room without your partner noticing that something is fundamentally wrong.
[00:43:32] Speaker B: Yet when the FBI finally brought Cody in for interrogation, he presented himself as completely unassuming and entirely unaware.
[00:43:42] Speaker A: He claimed total ignorance.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: He sat in the interview room and insisted he had no idea why his wife suddenly had an influx of of lavish designer bags showing up via courier or where all this sudden massive cash flow was originating from.
[00:44:01] Speaker A: Investigators obviously had deep theories about this dynamic. Interviews with friends described their relationship as highly turbulent, very up and down.
[00:44:11] Speaker B: The behavioral theory the FBI operated under was not necessarily that he was a complete co conspirator helping her drug people, but that he was engaging in massive willful blindness.
[00:44:24] Speaker A: He likely sensed that something was deeply dangerously amiss. But he actively chose not to rock the boat.
[00:44:30] Speaker B: Perhaps he was intimidated by her increasingly erratic dominant behavior.
Or more likely, he had grown financially dependent on this sudden influx of luxury and cash and he simply decided to look the other way.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: He constructed a reality where he didn't ask questions so he wouldn't have to hear answers.
Willful blindness is a powerful protective mechanism.
[00:44:55] Speaker B: When he was finally confronted by federal agents with the sheer unvarnished scale of the allegations that the mother of his child was an apex predator actively involved in the kidnapping and deaths of of multiple men, he was reportedly, deeply, genuinely shocked.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: His actual quote to the LA Times reporters covering the case was, if she did do it, damn, she put one over on me.
[00:45:23] Speaker B: So with the husband effectively cleared as a direct participating accomplice, federal law enforcement had to figure out how to actually capture her and make the charges stick.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: And this is where we see an absolutely brilliant, high stakes, tactical legal move by the FBI.
The arrest strategy here is a masterclass in international legal coordination.
[00:45:47] Speaker B: Exactly. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department actually arrested Phelps first. But they did not arrest her for the murders because the bodies in the jurisdictions were incredibly complicated.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: They arrested her her in Vegas on that old outstanding felony fraud warrant out of Arkansas. The one related to the digital spoofing and the vicious custody battle.
[00:46:10] Speaker B: But because it was classified as a non violent financial fraud charge, a local judge released her pending a future hearing.
[00:46:18] Speaker A: And what does a cornered predator do? The absolute. Second she is released from custody, she immediately takes a bus across Vegas, heads straight back to the airport and boards a flight deep into Mexico to hide out.
[00:46:32] Speaker B: But the FBI was watching every single move she made.
They tracked her flight manifest to the state of Jalisco in Mexico.
[00:46:42] Speaker A: Now, standard procedure might dictate that they immediately file a provisional arrest warrant and request formal extradition back to the United States.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: But the FBI played a much smarter, much longer game.
They coordinated directly with the US Legal attaches and local Mexican authorities to have the Mexican police arrest her.
[00:47:04] Speaker A: Yep, arrest her. But not on the US warrants, but on local robbery charges related to the crimes she committed on Mexican soil.
Believe it or not, this gave the United States prosecuting authorities a massive defining tactical advantage.
Lets explain the legal mechanics here.
By keeping her locked up in a Mexican prison under Mexican jurisdiction, her procedural rights as a criminal defendant in the United States had not yet kicked in.
[00:47:32] Speaker B: I think I understand this, but can you explain what procedural rights you're talking about, Sue?
[00:47:37] Speaker A: I thought you would never ask.
So the Speedy Trial act is found under Title 18, US Code Section 3161.
The moment you arrest someone federally, a legal countdown begins.
[00:47:50] Speaker B: Bottom line, Nick, the government is legally forced to indict them within 30 days and take them to trial within 70 days. If you fail, the case can be dismissed in its entirety, right?
[00:48:03] Speaker A: That's right.
Building a cross border serial murder case. Gathering financial records from multiple banks. Securing server logs from places like Apex.
Physically exhuming bodies in foreign countries.
Running complex international DNA tests. That takes immense time.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: You cannot do it in 30 days.
By letting Mexico hold her on local charges, the FBI essentially paused the U.S. constitutional clock.
[00:48:32] Speaker A: Yep, it warehoused her. It took her off the board so she couldn't murder anyone else. But it bought the federal agents the months of breathing room they desperately needed to build a bulletproof case without a federal judge breathing down their necks.
[00:48:46] Speaker B: And they use that borrowed time flawlessly.
Operating out of the district of Nevada, federal prosecutors secured a massive 21 count federal indictment.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: We are talking wire fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud, aggravated identity theft, and crucially, two federal counts of kidnapping. One of which specifically carries the enhancement of kidnapping resulting in death.
[00:49:11] Speaker B: Those federal charges carry a maximum penalty of life in federal prison. But she must finish her legal business in Mexico first.
[00:49:20] Speaker A: She was put on trial in a Mexican court for her direct role in the disappearance and robbery of the murdered American man.
She was found guilty of these crimes.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: The Mexican judge sentenced her to 37 years in a Mexican prison.
Once she serves her time there, or whenever those proceedings officially conclude, she faces eventual extradition back to the United States to face that looming life sentence.
[00:49:48] Speaker A: So all of this forces us to look at the aftermath, the actual full quantifiable toll of this devastation.
We know from the financial audits that she successfully stole an estimated $300,000 in liquid assets and goods.
[00:50:03] Speaker B: But she actively attempted to steal over $3.5 million.
The financial damage is staggering. But the financial damage is only half the story here.
[00:50:15] Speaker A: The emotional toll is catastrophic and it is weaponized by the scammers themselves.
We need to talk about the shame deficit.
[00:50:24] Speaker B: When you are conned by someone you thought genuinely cared about you, I especially at an older age when you feel you should know better, the humiliation is paralyzing.
[00:50:35] Speaker A: It makes you question your own cognitive abilities. It makes you question your own mind.
That shame is not a byproduct of the scam. It is a mathematical risk mitigation tool engineered by the scammer.
[00:50:48] Speaker B: Scammers know that law enforcement relies on victim reporting.
By engineering deep shame, they are effectively engineering their own legal immunity.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: The victims blame themselves, essentially acting as unindicted co conspirators in the COVID up of their own robbery.
That is exactly why the FBI firmly believes there are far more than just the 11 known victims out there suffering in silence.
[00:51:17] Speaker B: People are simply too embarrassed to come forward and admit they were free, fooled by the camouflage.
And that is exactly why we need to break down the warning signs.
[00:51:28] Speaker A: We have to strip away the shame and look at the mechanics.
What are the specific actionable red flags that families, friends and listeners should be watching out for to protect the people they love from the next Aurora Phelps
[00:51:41] Speaker B: the first major leg is uncharacteristic digital behavior.
If your father or grandfather said suddenly starts texting you using broken English syntax, then that's a red flag.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: Or abruptly announces wild entirely uncharacteristic life changes via text message. Like suddenly moving to Ecuador out of nowhere.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: You do not just accept that at face value. You do not just text back, okay, have fun.
You verify it.
You demand a voice call. You demand a video call.
Or you send local law enforcement to knock on their door.
[00:52:23] Speaker A: Then there is the money trail.
Families must normalize as having open, non judgmental conversations about finances with their older relatives.
[00:52:32] Speaker B: Look for bizarre purchasing patterns. If a 70 year old retired stagehand is suddenly executing thousands of dollars worth of transactions for high end Dior bags, or if you see routine shipments being redirected to secondary addresses in places like Las Vegas, that is a massive screaming red flag that their accounts have been compromised.
[00:52:54] Speaker A: And on a more physical, visceral level, you must look for medical anomalies. If your loved one suddenly has heavy sedatives, relaxants or hypnotics in their system when they have absolutely no prescription and no historical background of using them, that is an immediate crisis. If they are found in compromised, highly unusual states like the bathtub scenarios Phelps constantly engineered, do not let anyone write it off as just old age or a tragic slip and fall accident.
[00:53:24] Speaker B: Demand toxicology.
Ask the hard, uncomfortable questions. Stay skeptical, not scared.
[00:53:32] Speaker A: The goal of analyzing a monster like Aurora Phelps is not to terrify you out of ever using a dating app or to make you think everyone you meet is a predator.
[00:53:40] Speaker B: The goal is to arm you with the specific knowledge of how these predators build their camouflage, how they operate their traps, so you can spot the bait long before the trap ever snaps shut.
[00:53:53] Speaker A: And there is one universal, unbreakable rule in fraud. Whether we are talking about a cryptocurrency investment scam or a lethal romance scam. If someone on a dating app or someone you just met tells you, don't tell your family about us or let's keep this our little secret, that is
[00:54:11] Speaker B: absolutely your invitation to call your family immediately.
Secrecy is the oxygen that fraud requires to survive.
Cut off the secrecy, shine a light on it, and you kill the scam instantly. It is all about bringing the reality into the light.
These scammers rely heavily on isolating their targets from logic and from love.
[00:54:36] Speaker A: The stronger your connections are with your family and your friends, the harder it is for someone like Phelps to wedge her way into your life and manipulate your reality. Before we go, I want you to think about the digital footprint you leave behind every single day.
Phelps did not hack into these men's lives using complex code. She walked right through the front door using the loneliness and the desires they broadcast online. It makes you wonder what vulnerabilities are your social media profiles quietly broadcasting to the wrong person. Right now, the goal isn't to make people paranoid. It's to make them prepared.
Thanks for listening to behind the Scams part of the SOS Media Network.
If you found this helpful, consider supporting sos. We're a non profit scam prevention organization. Donations are tax deductible and unlike a scammer's promise, that part is real.
[00:55:31] Speaker B: Thanks for listening. Bye for now.
